1. Amsterdam Flame

2. BC Sweet God

3. BC Sweet Tooth

4. California Indica

5. First Lady

6. Granddaddy Grape Ape

7. Hash Plant

8. Northern Lights

9. Purple Kush

10. Wappa

via Colorado Medical Marijuana: Top 10 Indica Medical Marijuana Strains.

Collected references to known scientific cannabis research, studies, and analysis. Periodically updated.

via My List: A Collection on “Cannabis Medicine” (cannabis,marijuana,medicine,science,research,MMJ) | Diigo.

You also may find the tag search useful: cannabis, marijuana, MMJ, etc. There are literally thousands of references available in my Diigo library.

“It would be sending the wrong message to the children” is one of the standard responses to arguments in support of legalizing marijuana for medicinal or recreational use. I’m convinced that by keeping cannabis a Schedule One Controlled Substance, the Federal government is sending the wrong message to children. The DEA classifies marijuana as a Schedule One substance, which recognizes no medical value in cannabis, and yet there are over 50 scientific studies that prove cannabis has medicinal value.

The decades-long Federal government call for “more research” operates in a hypocritically circular fashion. When pro-cannabis groups push for drug law reform, the government says more research is needed. However, we lack sufficient research because of the current drug laws and the ideology within the government that prevents such research from taking place. Legitimate scientists, who seek to perform controlled empirical tests on cannabis, face a daunting gauntlet of bureaucratic hurdles that can last over a decade, and even then they almost always get turned down. Even when they are permitted to do the research, and their studies are published, the government conveniently ignores any studies that disprove the government’s own anti-cannabis ideology.

In the meantime, while big pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and lawyers wrestle over where to draw the so-called line in the sand, sick and dying people are deprived of their medicine, subject to arrest and home invasion by SWAT teams, or left to fend for themselves in the unsafe street drug market. Mexican drug cartels now control about 90% of the marijuana smuggled into the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Of course, now that the southern border has become militarized, many of those same cartels are now growing cannabis right here in the U.S., typically on public forest lands in California.

We should not politicize pharmacology. What message does this send to the children? The children are not stupid. They can see with their own eyes the patients in their families and neighborhoods who have been helped by cannabis as medicine. What message does lying to children send to them? If the government is lying about cannabis, maybe they’re lying about everything else they say is bad for us, right?

In the past few years, we have seen marijuana from an array of perspectives on the government’s side of the war on drugs. If, as the DEA and anti-cannabis advocates like to assert, there are alternative FDA-approved medications in existence for treatment of many of the proposed uses of cannabis as medicine, then why was GW Pharmaceuticals recently granted a U.S. patent for Sativex, which is IDENTICAL to raw, organic cannabis, only in liquid form and costing many times what cannabis sells for in dispensaries or even on the street? There is no guarantee that Sativex won’t be abused by patients to get high recreationally, even if they can afford to buy it, since the medicine is administered by the patients themselves.

Doesn’t the fact that a patent was even granted prove that cannabis has medicinal value? But wait, GW Pharmaceuticals is not the only entity that holds a U.S. patent for cannabis as medicine. It turns out that the Department of Health and Human Services also holds a cannabis patent (#6630507), granted in 2003. As you read through this .pdf document you will discover beyond any doubt whatsoever that cannabis has a tremendous variety of medicinal values and applications specific and provable enough to be granted a U.S. patent.

Cannabis is one of the first plants to have been used as a medicine, for religious ceremonies and recreationally, the first accounts of its use for these purposes stretching back 5000 years (reviewed in Mechoulam, 1986). The Cannabis plant from which the cannabis drug is derived has a very long history of medicinal use, with evidence (.pdf) dating back at least to 2,737 BCE, possibly even earlier. And yet the federal government continues to claim, in spite of these facts, that cannabis has no medicinal value? How can they possibly say that cannabis has no medicinal value, while at the same time they hold a patent that describes in great detail so many of the proven medicinal qualities that actually DO exist in cannabis?

Since one part of the government applied for the patent of medical marijuana, and another part of the government approved that patent, it seems logical to conclude that the Federal government knows and has publicly admitted that marijuana has valid medicinal value, despite their hypocritical claims that it doesn’t. Thousands of our military veterans are dependent on all kinds of prescription narcotic drugs with horrible side effects while the Department of Veteran’s Affairs stubbornly refuses to utilize medical marijuana, even though it would be very helpful in many cases, particularly in cases of PTSD. The VA allows veterans in states with legal medical marijuana programs to use cannabis without repercussions, but other veterans are denied the benefits of a medicinal cannabis program solely on the basis of where they happen to live. What message does allowing people to suffer needlessly send to our children whose parents may be war veterans in need of cannabis as medicine, or who may one day be service members themselves?

“Cannabis will one day be seen as a wonder drug, as was penicillin in the 1940s. Like penicillin, herbal marijuana is remarkably nontoxic, has a wide range of therapeutic applications and would be quite inexpensive if it were legal. Even now, good-quality illicit or homegrown marijuana, which is, at the very least, no less useful a medicine than Sativex, is less expensive than Sativex or Marinol.” – Dr. Lester Grinspoon, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2006

This may shock you. After all, isn’t our government’s official position that marijuana is not a medicine but a dangerous, addictive substance that only causes harm? Every month, four Americans battling serious illnesses receive a metal canister from the U.S. government, containing about 10 ounces of marijuana in pre-rolled cigarettes. The Federal medical marijuana program — referred to as a Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program — resulted from a lawsuit (Randall v. U.S) filed in 1976 by glaucoma patient Robert Randall, who successfully showed that his use of marijuana was a medical necessity. The marijuana these patients receive is grown on a farm at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, mostly from seeds of Mexican origin, rolled and packaged at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina under the supervision of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The program is administered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Federal government doesn’t want people to know. They don’t deny the existence of the program, but they sure avoid talking about it. It gets stranger: The IND is officially a research program, designed to find out if marijuana works as a medicine. The consent form patients were required to sign when they enrolled calls it a “study.” Yet the Federal government has never studied its own patients.

The extent of the Federal government’s hypocrisy on the issue of medicinal cannabis truly knows no bounds. How many of you just realized that what this actually means is that the Federal government has known that cannabis DOES have medicinal value, and has committed perjury in every single cannabis prosecution for the last 74 years through basing drug policy on something which they know is false? The government’s reasons for maintaining an outdated and harmful position on medical marijuana are running out. Why does the Federal government, which supplies cannabis to these four patients through a Federal program, want to throw other sick people in jail for following the advice of their doctor?

Society may wake up and question why would we want to put one out of every three high school seniors in prison and pay for them to stay locked up behind bars. Society may realize that is not a good use of resources, and therefore rethink the drug war. Our government’s blind commitment to ecological suicide for the sake of short-term profit for a small group of wealthy individuals with unwarranted power over policy is not a good model for the rest of the world to follow. The people are way ahead of the government. But how long will it take for government policy to catch up and deliver what the people demand?

Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don’t need to fight
To prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven

Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eye
It’s only teenage wasteland

Sally, take my hand
Travel south crossland
Put out the fire
Don’t look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let’s get together
Before we get much older

Teenage wasteland
It’s only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh, oh
Teenage wasteland
They’re all wasted!

It’s basically a song written to Meher Baba, whom Pete Townshend lovingly studied, telling Baba not to worry about the state of youth in the world, that it’ll all be okay even if the kids do smoke cannabis. Meher Baba’s writings are really quite remarkable.

“I have come not to teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts.
Throughout eternity I have laid down principles and precepts, but mankind has ignored them. Man’s inability to live God’s words makes the Avatar’s teaching a mockery. Instead of practicing the compassion He taught, man has waged crusades in His name. Instead of living the humility, purity and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed and violence.
Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form I observe Silence. You have asked for and been given enough words — it is now time to live them.”

- Meher Baba, The Universal Message, 1958

“I tell you all, with my Divine Authority, that you and I are not “WE,” but “ONE.” You unconsciously feel my Avatarhood within you; I consciously feel in you what each of you feel. Thus every one of us is Avatar, in the sense that everyone and everything is everyone and everything, at the same time, and for all time.”

- Meher Baba, Meher Baba’s Call, 1954

“Everyone points to California as the place where all this began politically, and they should,” he goes on. “But Colorado, unlike California, actually stepped up to create a mature reply to a sociopolitical public-health quandary and created a taxation and regulatory scheme. So we brought the conference here to acknowledge this, to learn from it, and in some respects, to honor it.”

via NORML 40th anniversary conference in Denver preview: A celebration of cannabis commerce – Denver News – The Latest Word.

Wishing everyone a high and happy 04/20 as we are about to kick off the 40th Annual NORML Conference in Denver, CO.

Slept about 7 hours, then immediately got back on Twitter, where the 4/20 crowd was just celebrating up a storm all across the country. Things were getting going up in Denver with the NORML 40th annual conference and it was fun to watch the Tweet stream about that. Wish I could have been there (also missed the HIGH TIMES Medical Cannabis Cup).

Pouring rain today in Colorado Springs, so I didn’t go to the 4/20 gathering in the park… but I did take my first steps at obtaining my medical marijuana card this evening, and was given the calling card of a local doctor. No, I did not smoke any weed (no connections) and my arthritis is acting up something terrible, but I’m on my way to getting legal, at least. I’d love to work in the MMJ industry, maybe in social media or something similar… still looking for an opportunity to do so; I’ve been keeping an eye on THCJobs twitter feed, but haven’t found the right opportunity yet. Looking… looking…

Muller and Schumann go on to suggest that a non-addictive use of drugs may have evolved to help the human race adapt to different aspects of life, and that we have learned to use drugs in ways that enhance our chances for survival and reproduction. Examples include alcohol helping a shy person overcome their shyness and initiate a sexual encounter, or amphetamines helping a tired student stay awake and study for crucial exams that will determine success in their professional life.

via Researchers argue ‘addiction’ a poor way to understand the normal use of drugs.

via Montel Williams’ Drug Paraphernalia Charges Dropped | Cannabis Culture Magazine.

Are they going to start testing everyone’s pipes now?

Ontario Superior Court Justice Donald Taliano found that the marijuana program is failing to ensure that patients who need the drug can get the necessary approvals. So the St. Catharines, Ont. justice declared the “Marihuana Medical Access Regulations” invalid.

And, because the problems with the program force medical marijuana users to resort to illegal means to obtain their marijuana, Taliano also struck down two sections of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit possession and cultivating marijuana.

He deemed the sections unconstitutional because they can be used to charge medical marijuana users who haven’t been able to obtain medical marijuana licences.

via CTV British Columbia – Ontario court strikes down marijuana laws – CTV News.

“I’ve come to realize that 10 is just not sufficient,” said Nguyen, who had originally backed that limit. “Let’s just be realistic. We have 110 in San Jose.”

There may be even more. Medical marijuana activists say there are about 125, a dramatic increase from October 2009, when the council first weighed regulations for what was then just a couple of new dispensaries. A year before that there were none known in the city.

The proposed zoning regulations will be forwarded to the city’s planning commission for review before returning to the City Council for another vote.

via San Jose council votes to sharply limit marijuana dispensaries – San Jose Mercury News.

The bill, originally sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, aims to bring medical marijuana dispensaries out of the legal gray area in which they operate under current law.

via Wash. bill regulating medical marijuana advances – seattlepi.com.

via National Marijuana Law Reform Conference To Be Held In Denver Announces Line-Up: Montel Williams and Ziggy Marley To Be Featured | Cannabis News.